Way out West (incorporating Way up North)

Fun and games in Sunny Wakefield.

It is unusual in my experience for the production period to be entirely without pain, in the case of Bouncers, however, it is as close as I’ve been for a long time. Although I had an ever changing list of sound cues issued daily from rehearsals, I was able to get most of it together before I went up for the get-in and the run up to opening. Fortunately I was able to take a small mountain of recording and editing gear up with me, and set up a recording studio in one of the dressing rooms. Most of the sound was compiled and edited on my laptop, and I was able to make edits and change stuff on the fly as required, before burning a series of show CDs with all the cues identified and in the right order, it was quite satisfying to be able to turn to the director and point out to him just how long the same process would have taken five years ago.
The lighting was also very painless; Wakefield has the same Chief Electrician that was there when I last toured there fifteen years ago, and her fierce energy and permanent good humour made the whole process a pleasure.
As always when the schedule is being put together you slot in as much contingency as you think you can get away with, this left us in the slightly embarrassing position of sending the actors home early three days in a row, as we fitted the lighting and sound sessions into much less time than we had allowed for.
This also left me in the slightly awkward position of trying to find something to do in Wakefield on a weekday evening, not easy if you are over 25 and not wanting to get stupidly drunk. Food that doesn’t involve chips isn’t easy either, one night I had the strangest Nasi Goreng I have ever had anywhere (it seemed to include apricot jam in its ingredients), however, my emergency touring chilli sauce saved the day.
Wakefield has in its centre one of the highest concentrations of what can only be described as prestige buildings; mostly dating from the late 19th century these monuments to Victorian self-aggrandisement and chutzpah are now 1980’s styled retro bars, their clientele a shrieking gaggle of teenagers, their odyssey chronicled in the show I have just designed. I find it very sad that this formerly prosperous wool and coal town is now dependant on the binge drinking youth culture to sustain its corporate income, and doubly sad that the burghers of Wakefield seem to think that this is a reasonable program for the future.
My hotel, bizarrely named ‘The Billy Budd Hotel’ (why would you name a hotel after a novel describing inhuman cruelty and dubious practises in the navy?), was so close to the theatre that I could walk to the stage door in less than two minutes, but set new standards in dubious British hotel keeping. I can’t comment on the food, even though I could smell the frying oil everywhere in the building I never made it to breakfast. My room overlooked the theatre car park, where both the Hotel, and the adjoining mega-pub stored their bins of empty bottles. The special glass collection service was at 5.00 am, followed by the bins at 7.00. The bed was microscopic and had a plastic undersheet, which can make the sleeping process uncomfortable, especially when the hotel is heated to a close to incendiary temperature and the window cannot be kept open because the catch has broken off.So it goes, there was no incentive to lounge in my room and watch telly, which is probably a good thing, and overall, Wakefield was a very positive experience, and the show was very well received. It is meant to tour in the autumn, with the very real possibility of going to Huddersfield, a venue that fills me with a positive and potential horror, about which I may yet blog.

posted by Lampy @ 4/01/2006 09:01:00 pm